Stages of Love
by Jaded
Summary: At first it's not love. It's not even attraction. But that soon enough changes. HeloSharon. Helo POV.


**TITLE: Stages of Love**

**AUTHOR: Jaded PG-13**

**FANDOM: Battlestar Galactica**

**CHARACTERS: Helo/Sharon**

**SPOILERS: Pretty much everything up to the end of season 2**

**SUMMARY: The first time they meet it's not love. It's not even attraction, but that all changes. Helo/Sharon. Helo POV.**

**Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my universe, but I've been told it's okay to play in this sandbox.**

The first time they meet it's not love. It's not even attraction. Starbuck introduces them at the Surly Wench, one of the seedier bars in Caprica City's less desirable neighborhoods, but that's why the pilots like it The Wench makes no effort to be what it's not, and it won't change if the business keeps rolling in.

It's a cold, rainy night, and Starbuck interrupts him while he's trying to pick up a redheaded civvie who has legs that seem to go out the door. Legs is fiddling with his dog tags, her long fingernails tapping against his name when Kara knocks him on the shoulders saying, "Hey, hey, hey," but because he's got things on his mind, and the bar is hot and steamy with all the bodies crammed inside, he only sees Sharon Valerii out of the corner of his eye, and she's registers as a faint hello and an ambrosia-fuzzy blur.

"Karl," Kara whines, "Karl, Karl, Karl!" But soon she's laughing in that maddening way she has about her, especially when she's had too much to drink. He tries to brush her off with a "Can't you see I'm busy here?" but she keeps saying, "I got someone for you to meet. C'mon, Helo, c'mon," but this time he wins and Kara moves on elsewhere to start trouble.

In retrospect he thinks how young he was then, although he's hardly much older now except in terms of experience, and he wonders at how he could have missed her, seen through her when she's all that he sees now.

That night he does leave with Legs. They frak all night and it's a gorgeous haze until she leaves in the morning. She leaves a dent in his wall, but his apartment is a piece of shit anyway. He opens up the window and watches her go, the air cool against his naked chest. He stretches and then takes a deep breath. It smells like rain and dirt, but it also smells like the city. Legs continues down the street and doesn't look back, and when she's out of sight he goes to the head to shower off her smell.

Helo's used to having just about a girl or two in every port, on every planet—once, sisters on Virgon—but that night signals the beginning of a change.

When he steps out of the bathroom later on, he smells clean like soap.

The second time they meet he doesn't remember her, but she remembers him. Sharon's leaning against a pole watching with these big brown eyes, quiet but amused as Kara climbs onto Zak Adama's back in the mess. Kara's riding her man like he's a bronc and they romp around the tables, screaming and laughing. But Helo's eyes aren't on them, even when Lee Adama comes into the room and starts yelling at his brother and Starbuck to quit it.

Helo makes sure to remove the lollipop from his mouth before he speaks to her, but Sharon makes sure he knows she's seen him coming when he finally introduces himself.

"What flavor?" she asks, and he feels the smile on his face stretch across what feels like the whole frakking universe.

Up close she's even more beautiful than he thought possible, and he feels a clench in his heart that says that this girl is something special. He doesn't really go for fleet ass—it's too much trouble, what with the politics and the egos—but it's more of a rule of thumb than anything else. He thinks he wouldn't mind getting to know this Sharon a little better, and wonders if Starbuck is up for some plotting.

"Lemon crème," he says, lifting the lolly up so that she can see the yellow and white swirls in the candy globe. "I'm Helo," he says, proffering his hand. She's not big, but she's tall, and he likes that she can almost look him in the eye.

Her whole face says, _I know_, but she humors him, and in that sweet, funny voice of hers that he'll learn so well, she says, "Nice to meet you. I'm Sharon Valerii."

Then Kara does her thing and crashes Zak a nearby table. Helo gets splattered with reconstituted wheat germ gruel and scrambled eggs. Sharon laughs. The sound tickles his ears and his head feels light and fuzzy. He suddenly can't take his eyes off her. She covers her mouth with one hand, still laughing, though a little nervous when she sees him staring —she's a nugget to flight school after all, the lowest of the low—but his smile tells her that it's not a big deal. He makes sure to emphasize that point when he pulls a splatter off his shirt and holds it out to her. "Hungry?" he asks.

Sharon joins him for lunch. He makes note to institute this as a daily ritual.

Helo gets stationed on the Battlestar Galactica and he's buzzing around in raptors because, although he'd like to fly a viper, he's too big for the cockpit. For a while he's the ECO for any raptor pilot that comes his way, but none of them really stick. He tells Starbuck this, but she's got no sympathy.

"Why would you want one of those nuggets to stick? They're so green they make a bottle of Caprican ambrosia look yellow."

"They're not nuggets, Kara. They're rooks."

"And the difference is?"

But there are no battles, and so it's not imperative that he find a pilot he can fly with yet. Galactica is scheduled for decommissioning in about two years time anyway, and Helo knows that even if he does find a partner, time wise it doesn't even make that much of a difference. At that point they'll both have to move on, and if they don't decide to transfer to the same battlestar then it's time for another round of musical pilots.

But then one day he hears about a new rook on board, a "Boomer" who's a new raptor pilot, in is doubly surprised when he walks into the locker room and sees Sharon Valerii standing at a locker, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, a hairbrush in one hand and a slip of paper in another. She's wearing her shirt and tank and sweatpants, but what he really notices are the clean white socks on her feet. She's a vision, and it makes him feel crazy, like he's hopped up on some hallucinogenic mushrooms from Picon's finest dealers. He'd half forgotten her since they'd last seen one another, but he thinks he needs to reconsider that notion, because every little moment floods back until his brain is submerged even though they'd only met a few more times after those first two days.

"Long time no see," he says, coughing loudly first to get her attention.

She turns, startled, but the smile comes right away and he's relieved she remembers him. "Helo!" she says, and there is a brightness like starbursts and solar flares in her voice. She comes up and hugs him. Her hairbrush hits his shoulder blades, but he sees it as just another detail to remember for later on.

"It has," she says. "I didn't see you much after that first week. That was too bad."

"They had us doing a lot of training exercises out in the field. You were what, doing lot of basic back then?"

He resists the urge to kiss her face. It doesn't make sense to him—this strength of attraction he feels for her—so he has to double his efforts to remain a gentleman. That's how his mother raised him, and Sharon, he can already tell, is not just any woman and should be treated accordingly. When they break apart he knows he has a goofy smile on his face, but if she thinks its odd she doesn't say.

"It's so nice to see a familiar face," she says. "I've seen Kara here and there, but she's so busy."

"How long you've been on board?"

"Two days."

He wonders how he missed her.

She holds up the piece of paper. "I've been assigned. I got two days to settle in and go through orientation, so now all I have to do is meet my new ECO. Do you know where I can find Karl Agathon?"

Helo takes the piece of paper out of her hand. "Kara didn't tell you?"

"No," Sharon says. There's a note of concern in her voice.

"Best ECO in the whole damn fleet, that Agathon."

There's a pause before Sharon gets it. She grins big. "Your name is Karl?"

Where no other pilot sticks, Sharon sticks. She's still a little shaky on the landings, but as a team they're symbiotic and everything click as it should. It doesn't take long before their names are mentioned in the same breath. They are suddenly experts on one another, and if somebody needs to know where Sharon is, he's the man to ask.

But suddenly there are gaps where he doesn't know where she is, time that isn't accounted for. They're each other's confidantes, and he knows all about her past—growing up on Troy, how the mining tragedy had a huge impact on her—he knows how she worries about how the other pilots view her, how she still feels like she's not making friends, but thanks the gods that he's in her life. She knows about his string of "girlfriends," and teases him mercilessly although she doesn't know that they mean nothing she mean means everything. She knows about how he dreams one day of being admiral of the fleet, but is nonetheless content where he is, and that he has an irrational fear of elevators. He doesn't like the closed-in space, although he's fine with being crammed into ships of all sizes, and he doesn't like the unknowability of a free fall if the elevator were to plunge with him locked inside.

What she doesn't know is that those side-long glances he gives her mean something bigger. She doesn't know that he knows that she eats her meals in a circle, a bite from each different item, always counterclockwise. She doesn't know that the reason he's always around her is not because he doesn't like the other pilots, but that he wants to be around because he cares about her, that he can't stay away, that when he is near her, he is happy no matter what.

It doesn't take too long to find out where she's been, though. Those arguments she's been having with the Chief aren't arguments. This is confirmed when he sees Cally with the same look on her face when she sees the two of them together, and when Helo meets her eyes she lets on that she's caught on to the ruse, too. The Chief and Sharon know their relationship is against regs. He's an NCO, she's his commanding officer, but they don't stop and on one says a word about it. Everyone plays dumb.

It breaks something in Helo, but he doesn't let on. When Sharon starts to confide little hints he plays it straight, pretends he doesn't know who she is referring to specifically. She seems happy, and he can't begrudge her that. He cares about her, so whatever makes her happy makes him happy, too. He goes on with his days. They fly together, play cards together, joke, eat, pick on the rooks. He tries to forget about her in that way. He takes time to mingle with the civilians, maybe recapture his old ways, although that doesn't work out. He thinks about his plans for after Galactica is decommissioned. He thinks about how he might get on the short-track for the admiralty.

He slips though after one too many shots of ambrosia, and Starbuck becomes unwitting priest to his confessor. She only lets loose one joke before she realizes what he needs is her sobriety, her understanding.

"I think I love her, Kara," he says, and he puts his head in his heads and groans. The word "love" just slips out. He's thought it, but it hadn't been real until it slipped out of his mouth just like that. It's late and most of the pilots are in their racks.

"It's not love, Karl. You just think it is."

"Isn't it love it feels like it's love? This isn't just a stupid crush, Buck. I'm not a schoolboy anymore."

"But she's with the Chief. You can't just have her."

"Isn't there that saying, 'All is fair in true love and war'?"

Starbuck sits down next to him at the card table and puts a hand on his shoulder. "Yes," she says, "but that doesn't mean you're the kind of guy who's gonna step in the way and try to break them up. You're too good for that."

"I'm sick of being good. I'm don't like always being the good guy. The simple guy--"

"You're not simple—"

"…the guy who steps aside and tries to 'the right thing.' That guy always loses."

"You can't help who you are, Helo. I don't think anyone, myself and Sharon included, would want you any differently."

And when he gives up his seat on his raptor for Dr. Baltar on Caprica, Helo is still that guy, and his heart won't let him be anyone else. When Sharon takes off with the few refugees he bites back the pain in his leg and waves goodbye as she ascends into the sky, and he has to believe that what he did was right, not just for humanity, for Sharon, for the refugees, but for himself as well.

Her tears, her heartbreak tell him that she loves him in her own way, and he has to take comfort from that, and from the memory of her face and her friendship until he dies either from a cylon attack or radiation poisoning.

He has six days to think about this as he runs through the forests of Caprica hiding. He thinks about his family, his parents and sisters, and about his family on Galactica. He thinks about what he used to want and what he wants now. He wonders at the end of the world and about the beginning, and about the line between point A and point B. But mostly he's thinking about running and medicine and food and sleep until on the sixth day he's captured by the cylons and he realizes that this just might be his very end, and he's panic but also relieved. It had to come eventually.

But it is Sharon who resurrects him with the gunshot that kills the machine masking itself as a beautiful, leggy blond. She might have been a type he would have gone for in what seems now like a past life. He is disbelieving, and it takes him days to really believe that she is there, that she came back for him.

The shock is enough to make him get to the point. It's selfish, maybe, but he has to tell her that he loves her, that he's wanted her, that while he knew she was with the Chief he still felt the way he felt and it didn't change, although he respected their relationship.

"But I would have given anything to be him," he says, awkward as it comes out. Helo thinks, no time like the present, especially if it's the end of the world, and Sharon's response is beyond anything he could have ever imagined. When they make love on the forest floor it's as though they've been lovers for years, so familiar are they with each other's bodies. If it wasn't love what he felt before, it is now, and each day they spend together on Caprica shapes it more finely and molds it more strongly so that he can't imagine anything that could happen that could break it, that could shatter this love, this perfect thing.

Helo can hardly suspect what trials and hardships lie in store for them both in the future, though. Somehow, even as Galactica orbits above New Caprica and Sharon remains in her cell, barely speaking to him, closed off from the world, he can't not love her still. He can't not believe that she doesn't love him back. And while it's not much, she makes small gestures that give him hope—watching him as he leaves her cell (he can see her reflection in the glass), taking the lollipops he leaves with her meal try (something he's only allowed to do now that he's Galactica's XO)—the show him that Sharon is still with him.

He knows he's drawn one crazy frakking lot in this life, but Helo can't help who he is. He can't help who he loves. He knows this is just another stage. He is a patient man. He can wait.

The End


End file.
